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Jonah, German Academy Student

For Jonah, the language immersion environment made his transition into thinking and speaking in German much more fluid.

“I remember on the first day or two thinking in my head, wow, this is going to be really difficult. I'm not going to pick this up. But then, because of the Language Pledge®, because of the environment, it was actually easy to fluidly think and speak in German.

“I didn't know so much about the Academy before I came here. I knew that it was all in German, and that it was with other teenagers. That was really what attracted me to coming here. The reason I chose German is that I visited Germany once and I really love the country, and I want to be able to be there more, and be able to engage myself more with the culture there.

“I actually came to the Academy as a beginner, so I didn't know any German. And for the first week, I had a lot of trouble communicating. For the second week, I could communicate, although I had terrible grammar. And my greatest accomplishment was in the third week putting that together, and being able to speak with more fluidity.

“The immersion environment made my transition into thinking and speaking in German much more fluid. I'm really excited to go to Germany. I think the Academy was extremely a good learning process before going to Europe. I thought that it would be really hard to learn German, but actually it was really easy. I just had to live in the Academy environment and that was what transitioned me into speaking German.”